Russia holds the 'highest value card' in Syria, but is nowhere near ready to play it

US
Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir
Putin.Mandel
Ngan/Pool/Reuters

Two Western intelligence sources
told the Financial Times last week that Russia sent an
envoy to Syria late last year to ask Syrian President Bashar
Assad to step down, raising questions about whether
Moscow's support for the embattled leader has dwindled over
the past four months.

But experts are skeptical that Russian President Vladimir Putin —
a staunch supporter of Assad and his regime — would seek the
leader's ouster now, when pro-government forces are finally
starting to win consecutive battlefield victories in Latakia and
Aleppo provinces.

"I don't think that the message Moscow is telling Assad is
'go' so much as, 'You may have to go,'" Mark Galeotti, an expert
on Russian security affairs and a professor of global
affairs at New York University, told Business
Insider.

He added:

At this stage, the Kremlin has nothing to gain from Assad
stepping down and potentially much to lose as there would be a
difficult transition. This is one of their highest value cards:
They will only play it when they know they will gain
something concrete in return.

Moscow was quick to deny reports that it ever asked Assad
to step down. But the extent of Russia's support for the
London-educated autocrat has been disputed. Some analysts
insist that Putin is not as interested in preserving
Assad as he is
in preserving the state institutions the Assad clan has
erected over the course of its nearly 45-year reign.

ISW

Those institutions and the people who control them have
allowed Russia to retain its port of Tartous, the
only warm-water port Russia retained after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and a key foothold for Moscow to continue projecting
power into the Mediterranean.

Some claim, however, that those institutions would
cease to exist without Assad.

"The biggest myth out there is the existence of 'state
institutions' separate from Assad," Tony Badran, a Middle East
expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,
told Business Insider in October.

To that end, many experts insist that Russia's stake in
Syria is much bigger than Tartous.

"It is the perception of thwarting violent
regime change — not a naval gas pump in Tartous — that is most
important to Vladimir Putin," Frederic C. Hof, a former special
adviser for transition in Syria under US President Barack Obama
and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council,
wrote in The Huffington Post on Monday.

Maintaining that perception is important, some experts say,
because it helps Russia present itself to the international
community as an agent of stability and bulwark against terrorism.
Moscow has long considered any and all opponents to Assad's
regime, including those supported by the US, to be "terrorists."

That Russia sees the only alternative to an Assad
regime as a power vacuum dominated by rebels hostile to Moscow's
interests means, implicitly, that Assad must keep his seat
in Damascus — at least, as Putin has insisted, until Syrians
vote him out of power in a national election.

Syrian
President Bashar Assad and Putin.AP

"There is not the slightest evidence that Putin wants Assad
to leave," Mark Kramer, the program director of the Project
on Cold War Studies at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies, told Business Insider on
Friday. "The whole purpose of Russia's
intervention in Syria was to stabilize Assad's regime and
strengthen its hold on power."

He added: "The notion that Putin designated the head of
military intelligence to deliver such a momentous proposal to the
head of a regime Putin wants to stabilize stretches credulity. I
don't attach any credence to it."

Other experts have noted, too, that if Putin really wanted
Assad out of power, attempts at a transition would have been made
long ago.

"If Putin wanted to push forward a transition, he could use
the large amount of leverage Russia has now as Assad's de
facto air force," Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the
Washington, DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, told Business Insider.

"These stories keep popping up, but talks continue to
stagnate and Assad seems to be entrenched," he added.

A
Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during clashes with the
Syrian Army in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on
August 7, 2012.Goran
Tomasevic/Reuters

Indeed, one of the opposition's central demands — that
peace negotiations address, first and foremost, Assad's
transition out of power —
has reportedly been sidelined in favor of a joint
Russian-Iranian plan. That proposal would establish a "national
unity government," the composition of which would be decided
by Syrian voters in an election monitored by the UN.

US Secretary of State John Kerry
has reportedly been pressuring the main opposition
council, the Saudi-backed High Negotiating Committee, to
accept this plan before attending Friday's peace talks in
Geneva.

In that sense, the US has aligned itself with Russia, to some
extent — at the risk of alienating the rebels — in an effort to
get everyone to the negotiating table. That risk could feasibly
be alleviated, however, by hinting about Russia's supposed
flexibility on Assad's future.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Zilberman, of the FDD,
said. "Until then, it's messaging."